In his no longer extant Pro Titinia Cottae, Cicero defended his client against the charge of "spells and incantations." While this speech no longer exists, Cicero's InVatinium and Apuleius' Apologia offer insight into Cicero's potential arguments, providing more understanding of elite views of magic in an undocumented time period.

Petrarchan poetry uses music to tie love and magic together and emphasize tensions between carnality and spirituality. Barnabe Barnes provides an explicit example of this in his sonnet sequence Parthenophil and Parthenophe. Parthenophil includes a series of songs that begin as Orphic magic but descend into demonic ritual. These shifts engage debates surrounding the theological status of natural magic to reflect on the problems of unregulated desire and complicate our understanding of Petrarchan neo-Platonic spirituality.

In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kurtz serves as a magical figure, casting a spell on all around him through his mesmerizing voice and indomitable will. Marlow’s quest is laden with fantastic elements that support familiar archetypes and utilize symbols of the fantastic to problematize a journey into the human soul.

I argue that Alan Moore’s Promethea is nothing short of alchemy: a radically instructive magical guide to the graphic medium. Read as a whole, the comic series forms a primer that teaches the reader not only how to decipher a culturally-abjectified text, the comic, but how to best navigate the mystical collaboration that Scott McCloud explains is “at work in the spaces between panels.”